Fidelity Files (24 page)

Thinking back, I had underestimated her ability to adapt. Her ability to upgrade to a faster processing speed. And ultimately, her ability to not only accept the information she was provided, but to allow it to completely corrupt every ounce of logic in her entire system. Like a virus.

She stood up straight and looked me directly in the eye. Her voice never faltered as she recited the same line she must have rehearsed over and over again in the five-minute drive to my condo. "I still want you to test Eric."

I GUESS you could say I stumbled into my current job as a fidelity inspector. It's not like I planned it. It's not like I woke up one morning with the brilliant idea that I wanted to spend the rest of my life seducing married men.

The first one was, for all intents and purposes, an accident.

It was a work happy hour. The crowd had finally dwindled down to just me and a few young female coworkers from my investment bank. After a few too many Rolling Rocks, we began what started out as a very innocent but amusing game of Truth or Dare. Which eventually morphed into just "dare." It was all very harmless. "I dare you to pretend you knew the bartender in high school, and then act offended when he doesn't remember you." Or "I dare you to walk up to that table and ask them how they're enjoying their meal." But after a few more beers it started to take a more scandalous turn, when dares to casually say "Nice balls" to the people playing pool and dares to flash pieces of covered skin to passersby seemed to become more amusing and popular than the less risqué versions that had entertained us earlier in the evening.

The hot seat had passed several times around the circle, and at approximately 11:30 P.M., it landed on me for the last time.

"Okay, Jen." My colleague Rebecca pointed a long polished finger in my direction.

I smiled and brushed a strand of hair behind my ear. "Yes," I replied confidently and fearlessly. I had successfully fulfilled my last dare with flying colors when I walked into the men's room, motioned confusedly to the urinal, and said, "What a strange-looking sink" to the man inside. The girls had watched from the restroom hallway, laughing hysterically and high-fiving one another like frat boys at a porn convention.

Rebecca eyed her two neighbors knowingly, and they all exchanged smiles.

"What?" I asked, wanting to be a part of the secret.

Her eyes drifted off to a man at the end of the bar, who was dressed in a smart business suit and mingling with a group of other well-dressed professionals. "See that guy over there?"

I surreptitiously glanced to my right. "The one holding the glass of whiskey?"

Rebecca's face showed her clear distaste for his choice of alcohol as she nodded. "Yes."

"Okay," I confirmed.

She exchanged another verifying glance with Hilary and Tina on either side of her. "Well, you have to go over there, talk to him, and without ever suggesting anything, get him to ask you back to his place."

I burst out laughing. "Yeah, right."

But when I looked up, expecting to see three faces laughing right along with me, I was greeted with nothing but deadpan expressions. "You're kidding, right?"

Rebecca shook her head. "No. C'mon, the stakes are getting higher, step up to the plate."

I looked over at the man again. "No! I can't do that."

"If anyone can, it's you," Hilary piped in.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"It means," Tina began, "that you're by far the best looking of any of us, and
we
have this little theory that no matter what the place or the time or even the outfit you're wearing, any man would jump at the chance to take you home."

I snorted. "That's ridiculous!"

"I don't think so," Hilary replied matter-of-factly.

"What? Did you guys plan this? Before we even got here?"

Hilary looked to Rebecca. It was obvious they had.

"Not exactly," Rebecca clarified. "It's just come up a few times... like at lunch or whatever. I mean, we see how all the guys at the office look at you."

I scrunched up my face. "No!" I insisted. "That's not true."

"Prove it," Rebecca challenged.

"But he's married," I protested, noticing his ring.

"That won't stop him," said Rebecca cynically. "He's still a guy."

I looked desperately to Hilary and Tina, hoping for a counteroffer. I received none. Apparently this was a spectacle to which
everyone
wanted to bear witness.

To this day I don't know if it was the ambush or the Anheuser-Busch, but after a long, hesitant look at all three of them, I silently pulled myself out of my seat, slung my bag over my shoulder, and slowly strolled the three paces to my very first subject.

The rest of the story went pretty much the same as all my subsequent stories. Flirty glances, coy smiles, witty banter. A slight exaggeration of my level of intoxication. And as it turned out, Rebecca, Tina, and Hilary were right. I didn't exactly get an invite to his house, but it didn't take long for him to ask me if I wanted to go someplace less crowded, and according to my panel of judges, that was good enough.

When I said the whole thing was an "accident," technically I was referring to the day after. When I found out what these "lunchtime conversations" behind my back were really about.

The next morning at work Miranda Keyton, a vice president of mergers and acquisitions, pulled me into her office for an impromptu meeting.

I found it somewhat odd that she would be requesting to meet with me alone. As I was only an analyst at the firm, requests were usually streamlined from her through many levels of bureaucracy, and then finally reached my lowly level after they'd been picked apart, analyzed, and altered by several echelons of the corporate food chain.

So I could only assume that getting a direct request from Miranda was either really, really bad news, like "Pack your bags, you've been laid off," or really, really good news like, "Pack your bags, you're moving to an office. You've been promoted."

As I stepped timidly into her corner office Miranda looked up from her computer screen, pushed her glasses onto the top of her head, and offered me a pleasant but reserved smile.

I smiled back.

"Close the door please, Jennifer."

Definitely not good news.

I closed the door behind me and took a seat in one of the chairs across from her.

"Thanks for coming in," she said as she leaned back in her black leather executive chair and studied me from across the desk.

"Sure."

"Well," she began, folding her hands in her lap. "I just wanted to call you in here to thank you personally for what you did."

I nodded, mentally rummaging through all the e-mails I had sent out in the past twenty-four hours that would have somehow ended up in Miranda's in-box. "You mean the, um... the, uh, DVD market analysis thing?" I ventured.

Miranda smiled,
almost
endearingly, but not quite. "No, Jennifer. I mean the 'my husband analysis' thing."

I frowned in confusion. I certainly didn't remember any requests relating to her husband. Had one of those recent data inquiries been initiated by him for some reason? Had he been using the bank's internal resources for some research of his own?

"I'm sorry," I said, trying not to sound completely clueless, but rather as if that
specific
analysis had merely slipped my mind momentarily, and a simple keyword would surely trigger the correct memory center of my brain and put me right on track with the conversation. "Which request was that?"

"The one from last night," she stated candidly.

This completely threw me off. And now I most definitely appeared even more out of the loop than before. I hadn't even been in the office last night. I was at a bar with a bunch of people
from
the office. Investment bankers were notorious for working late nights, even
all
night. In fact, last night we were out celebrating the first pre-seven P.M. departure in what had felt like months.

"I'm sorry," I began again, now convinced that I sounded like a complete moron, but at this point not really caring that much. I just wanted to know what the hell she was talking about and kindly let her know that she was obviously confusing me with someone else. "I wasn't working last night."

"Well, not in your normal capacity, anyway," she joked to herself. "But you definitely helped me out."

I sat in silence, waiting for an explanation. I wasn't about to continue to look at her dumbfounded, saying inept things like "Huh?" or "What?" or "I'm sorry" over and over again like an incompetent idiot.

"You hit on my husband last night...at the bar."

My mouth dropped. I blinked nearly two dozen times, completely flabbergasted. I could feel my face getting hot. Twenty straight hours in the blazing afternoon sun would have been no match to the deep red color my skin was now exhibiting for all to see. I didn't know what to say. And if I had been afraid of sounding like an idiot just a few seconds ago, it was surely nothing compared to the babbling sounds that were involuntarily coming out of my mouth at this moment.

"Uh...um...but...the thing is...I...um...I didn't know he was your..."

"Of course you didn't!" she exclaimed, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "If you did, there was no way you would have
ever
gone through with it!" She chuckled lightly, somewhat amused by the whole thing. In my mind she was starting to look a lot like Dr. Evil from
Austin Powers,
sadistically plotting the destruction of the planet unless someone agreed to pay her one hundred billion dollars.

"You mean...?"

She nodded her head sadly. "I'm afraid so. I'm very sorry to have brought you into this whole mess. I know it's not any of your business. And certainly not your problem. But I had to confirm my suspicions."

I felt like I had just been knocked in the head with a sledgehammer but miraculously lived to tell about it. I just couldn't believe that the entire thing had been a setup, which would mean that Hilary and Tina had been in on it from the beginning. And that whole Truth or Dare game had just been a ruse to get me to that final challenge, the one that apparently had been Miranda's idea all along. Although, honestly, it didn't surprise me that Hilary and Tina had gone behind my back in order to satisfy one of Miranda's requests. Analysts will do just about anything to kiss up to high-level VPs.

I didn't know how to respond or what to say to her. What kind of response do you even begin to formulate in a situation like this? It's not like there's a section about this kind of thing in any proper social etiquette handbook, and my college class in business relationships certainly hadn't covered it.

And if I was speechless then, you can imagine my reaction when I got a phone call a few weeks later from a woman who introduced herself as "a close friend of Miranda Keyton's," asking if she could pay me to provide her with the same invaluable service I had afforded Miranda.

"I need to know the truth," she explained to my stunned silence on the other end of the phone. "I need to confirm my suspicions so I can stop wondering and move on." Her words poked at a deep wound inside of me. One that I never thought could ever be fully healed. But for the first time in months, after seeing my mother mourn the loss of so many years of happiness due to a lifetime of blissful innocence, I felt a twinge of restitution.

I couldn't turn back time and erase the choice that had deprived my mother of her right to know. But maybe I could at least help this woman uncover hers.

And the next woman.

And the next.

Until I found myself right here. Right now. Staring at another woman's quest for enlightenment. Only this time the woman was my best friend.

The girl who used to drive me around in her parents' minivan. The girl who was first to get her period, kiss a boy, get her driver's license, lose her virginity, and still find time to share it all with me. The girl who came to me with every problem, every question, every dilemma, every freak-out, every fear, and every decision. And I was always there for her. I've always been her rock. Her solution, her answer, her voice of reason, her equilibrium, her pacification ...and her friend.

And now she was coming to me for this.

Even if it hadn't started out that way, that's what it was now.

And who was I to deny her? Especially when I'd devoted my life to eliminating denial.

"All right," I said to Sophie's pleading eyes. "I'll do it."

And the moment I said it, I knew I had made a huge mistake.

AS IF completely unphased by the concept that I, her best friend, would soon be attempting to seduce her fiancé, Sophie pushed her way through the door, plopped down on the couch, and immediately launched into all of the preparatory details.

"Okay, great," she began, reaching into her purse and pulling out her black day planner. "Eric comes into town in a week. He said he wants to catch up with some old college friends. So they'll be out at a bar, drinking, acting stupid...you know, guy stuff. I think
that
would be the perfect time to do it." She made a small note in her planner.

I watched her in complete shock. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought she were planning her boyfriend's surprise birthday party – not his fidelity inspection. She certainly was the most ambitious and organized client I'd ever taken on.

"Okay," I said cautiously.

She began furiously jotting down notes on a blank note page. I leaned over to try to read what she was scribbling. No luck.

And then, in one fluid motion, she ripped the once-blank page from her notebook and handed it over to me.

I reluctantly sat down next to her. "What's this?" I asked, squinting at the messy handwriting.

"A list of things that Eric likes. His hobbies, favorite foods, movies, et cetera. I figured it might come in handy."

I stared at the list, absolutely speechless. Part of me wanted to laugh, but I knew it wouldn't be appropriate. She was basically doing my job for me. These were all the exact details I had to practically squeeze out of the women who hired me. But not Sophie. She was as diligent about this process as a new car buyer walking into a dealership armed with a stack of industry reports, pricing models, and cash-back-incentive newspaper ads. Not that I was complaining. Anything to lessen the burden of what I had just agreed to do.

"So that day works for you?" Sophie asked me, pulling my attention away from the words "White Castle," which had been scribbled furiously underneath the heading of "Favorite Fast Food."

"Uh-huh," I confirmed vacantly.

"Jen!" Sophie practically shrieked.

I grimaced at the sound.

"Shouldn't you be entering all this in that stupid Palm Pilot phone you take everywhere?" And then under her breath added for good measure, "And now I know
why
."

I pulled myself off of the couch. "Right. Doing it now."

Sophie eyed me with trepidation. "You know, I kind of thought you'd be a little bit more on the ball about this stuff. You seem very blasé about the whole thing. Are you this unprofessional with all your clients?"

I grabbed my Treo from my bag and headed back to the couch. "Well, honestly, Soph," I began. "You're not really a typical client, now, are you?"

Sophie twisted up her mouth as she contemplated my question. "Well, no. I know that. But listen, for this particular purpose, I want you to treat me like any other client. I don't want any special treatment or considerations. Do exactly what you do with every other guy you flirt with."

"Oh, so now suddenly you're okay with my flirting with married men?"

She shrugged and closed her day planner, sticking it awkwardly back in her bag. "Why not? You're serving a purpose, right?"

"A purpose that happens to serve you as well?"

Sophie rolled her eyes. "Whatever."

I laughed at her. "You know what this means now, don't you?"

She turned toward me. "What?"

I leaned back against the couch and pressed my hands anxiously against my thighs. "It means I'm going to have to tell Zoë."

"Why?"

"Because John knows, and now you know, and it was fairly easy for
me
to keep it a secret from all of you, but what are the chances that both of you are going to be able to successfully keep it from her?"

"John knows?" Sophie asked, surprised, and honestly, appearing a little hurt. "Why does John know?"

"Trust me, it wasn't me who told him."

She eyed me with curiosity and I proceeded to tell her the very abbreviated version of my little Internet celebrity status, all the way up to the point where just tonight I had found out that Raymond Jacobs was the culprit behind all of it.

"So what are you going to do?" Sophie asked after I finished.

I shrugged my shoulders and released a pained sigh. "I don't know yet. Try to talk to him, I guess?"

"You think that'll work?" she asked with about the same amount of doubt as I was feeling inside.

I tucked my feet underneath me and fidgeted with the fraying cuff of my jeans. "Not sure. I suppose it's worth a try."

"Well, I'm glad that Zoë's going to find out," Sophie proclaimed after a short but loaded silence.

I smiled. "Why's that?"

She sat up proudly. "Because now at least she'll know for sure that I was right."

I crinkled my forehead. "About what?"

"About you!" she exclaimed. "You know how long it took to convince her that your little lack-of-dating problem really was a problem? She insisted that it was just work-related. But I
knew
it was something more, and it turns out..." Her voice trailed off as her thought process came full circle.

"That it
was
work-related?" I maintained with an amused smirk.

Sophie waved my comment away. "You know what I mean."

THE DOORBELL rang as I was stepping out of the shower on Thursday evening. A brief panic hit me as I did a double take at the clock. It was only six-thirty. Jamie wasn't supposed to pick me up for our date until eight o'clock. I immediately worried that I might possibly have marked down the wrong time.

I peered through the peephole in the door to find Sophie and Zoë standing anxiously on the other side. I reluctantly opened the door.

"What are you guys doing here?" I asked, somewhat aggravated by their surprise visit.

"Well, nice to see you, too, bi-atch!" Zoë feigned offense.

"Yeah, not much of a welcome committee, are ya?" Sophie added.

I held my towel around me with one hand and rested the other on the door handle. "Sorry."

"So what's this big secret that everybody knows about but me?"

I glared at Sophie.

"Sorry!" she said. "I thought you would have told her by now!"

"It's only been a day!"

Zoë looked impatiently back and forth between me and Sophie. "Well?" she demanded. "Here I am. So tell me, already!"

I opened the door wider and motioned for them to come in. They stepped around me, and without any hesitation seated themselves on the couch, like guests on a talk show waiting for their personal interviews to begin. I closed the door and started to make my way to the bedroom. "Let me just put on some clothes."

"No!" Zoë insisted. "Nothing I haven't seen under there. You'll tell me
now
."

I rolled my eyes and tucked the edge of my towel under my armpit. I sat down next to Sophie. "Okay, so what did you already tell her?"

"Nothing!" she cried defensively. "I just asked what she thought about your news and she looked at me like I was crazy. Then I realized that you hadn't said anything and I insisted that you tell her yourself."

Zoë tapped her stiletto heel against the hardwood floor. "I'm waiting."

I let out a loud sigh. "I didn't really want to tell you like this. I was waiting for the right time to sit you down and explain everything to you."

Zoë motioned to the couch. "Well, we're definitely not standing."

I ran my hand over my wet hair. "Okay. To put it simply, I'm not exactly an investment banker."

Zoë's face remained expressionless as she waited for me to continue.

"In fact, I'm not an investment banker at all. For the past two years I've been doing a very different kind of job."

Still no reaction. So I kept going.

"I...um... women hire me to 'test' their husbands and boyfriends for, let's just call it, 'unfaithful tendencies.'"

Zoë's tongue ran over the front of her teeth as she earnestly contemplated my last sentence. However, if she had reached any sort of opinion about it, her face still refused to show it, almost as if I had simply informed her of my decision to switch dry cleaners. Although, knowing Zoë, she would probably have had an opinion about that, too.

Maybe she just hadn't been given enough time to fully absorb it. "You see, Zo" – I decided to try another approach – "I go out and flirt with these men...pretend to be interested in them to see if they'll try to have sex with me."

There... that should do it
. It doesn't get more blunt and visual than that.

But the look on her face was still nothing more than someone trying to remember where they had last seen their missing keys. She was completely unresponsive to anything coming out of my mouth.

Sophie watched her intently and then turned to me, her eyes searching for answers, but unfortunately, my eyes were asking the same exact questions. We were both at a total loss.

Zoë finally looked at Sophie, then at me, and with a slight shrug asked, "Is that all?"

Sophie stared in utter disbelief. "What do you mean,
is that all?
Don't you find that just a tad bit shocking, Zoë?"

She contemplated this as well, and then with another shrug and a simple shake of her head, replied, "No, not really. I mean, it was pretty obvious that Jen hasn't been an investment banker for a while now."

"It was?" I spit out, stupefied.

Zoë laughed affectionately at me. "Um, yeah, Jen. Sorry, you're not that good of a liar."

"So you've known all along?" Sophie asked.

Zoë leaned back against the couch. "Well," she admitted, "I didn't know
exactly
what she'd been up to, but I knew something was different. She hasn't been the same for a few years."

I sat staring at my friend in complete astonishment. All this time I thought I was fooling everyone. And I almost was. Everyone except Zoë, that is.

"Plus," she continued, "I ran into that guy Nate Evans last year at the movie theater. Remember the guy from Stanley Marshall who you tried to set me up with a few years back? Well, anyway, he told me that you quit, like, months ago."

"But..." I couldn't even begin to make sense of what she was saying. Here I was thinking I would have to go through one more round of relentless questions from another close friend, but in all actuality it was the other way around. "Why didn't you ask me about it? Why didn't you confront me when you knew I didn't work there anymore?"

Zoë took a deep breath. "I don't know. I figured you were doing your own thing. And when you wanted to talk about it, you would come to us. So I just let you be."

"Wow." Sophie was bemused, looking just the slightest bit jealous that Zoë had so easily broken part of the code when she had been in the dark this whole time.

"But good for you, though," Zoë offered. "I must admit, it's kind of nice not having to speculate on what you might be up to anymore. For a while I convinced myself you were stripping at that club down the street from here. But honestly, I stopped trying to figure it out about six months ago."

"So you think it's a good thing?" I verified.

She nodded. "Sure. I mean, I don't blame you for wanting to do it. After what happened with your parents."

My shoulders slouched and I nodded softly. "Right."

Sensing my discomfort, Zoë quickly changed the subject. "So what are you getting ready for now?" she asked, gesturing toward the wet towel clinging to my body. "Another night of flirting with the unsuspecting?"

I stood up and hiked the towel higher around my chest. "No," I said quietly. "I'm ...well, I'm going on a date, actually."

Both of my friends simultaneously jumped off the couch with more uniformity than an Olympic synchronized-swimming team. "What?" Sophie screeched.

"It's that guy from the plane, isn't it?" Zoë speculated with exhilaration.

Sophie turned to her. "What guy from the plane?"

"Jen met this cute guy on the plane back from Vegas and they totally hit it off, and she told me that she wasn't going to call him, but I knew she would."

"Well, you just know everything these days, don't you?" I asked, walking toward my bedroom.

The girls followed shortly after, like two dogs persistently pursuing a toddler snacking on crumbling pretzels.

"I know you, Jen," Zoë stated proudly. "You think no one knows you. But you are so wrong. You're more readable than you'd like to admit."

"Not to the men she seduces," Sophie shrewdly pointed out, wanting so much to compete in what she now perceived as a "Who knows Jen better?" competition.

"That doesn't count," Zoë replied. "They have so much testosterone running through their bloodstreams, I doubt they would notice if she wrote, 'This is a setup' across her forehead in red lipstick. Fooling an idiot male with a hard-on who's had sex with the same woman for the past twenty years isn't exactly a challenge."

"Well, know-it-all," I began self-importantly as I stepped into my closet and began riffling through my ten thousand outfit selections. "Turns out you're wrong. I
didn't
call him. I bumped into him at the Range Rover dealership."

"And you decided to finally listen to the universe," Zoë pointed out.

I bit my tongue in defeat. "Okay, so you
were
right about that."

Zoë plopped down on the bed with a bounce and smiled proudly. Sophie, slightly more dejected and feeling very out of the loop, settled with less celebration into the seat next to her.

"Soph," I said, sensing her feeling of exclusion. "I'm so useless with these things. Will you
please
just pick out something for me to wear? Or I could be in here all night."

Sophie's face immediately brightened as she eagerly rose to her feet and waltzed into the closet to perform her civic duty as the fashion-adept friend.

WHEN JAMIE called my personal cell phone to let me know he was just pulling up in front of my building, I quickly interrupted him. "I'll come down," I blurted out before he could even finish his sentence, most likely leaving him with the suspicion of dead bodies that I had yet to clean up after, or a variety of illegal drugs laid out on the coffee table awaiting proper measuring and packaging, or possibly even an estranged husband who thought I was going out with the girls this evening. But truth be told, I wasn't quite ready to let him into my house yet. Giving him my address had been hard enough. But the thought of having him walk around inside my home made me just the slightest bit nauseous.